


A Girl (?) In a Box

by bethanythemartian



Series: Letters From Persephone [3]
Category: Firefly
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-07 05:15:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18613894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethanythemartian/pseuds/bethanythemartian
Summary: The ship Serenity takes on some new passengers and faces a kind of moral crisis...





	A Girl (?) In a Box

Dear everybody-

I was so excited to get y'alls letter and was about bursting for the package, by the time it finally caught up!

The dress fits perfectly, Inara says it looks good on me. I don't know how much a fan I am of 'slinky' but you're right, sometimes it's more called for than the other. 

Oh, the glitter was fine, though the pot had nearly unscrewed by the time the package got to me. Kind of a near thing! Try tape, next time, should keep it snug. There's special tape that holds in vacuum, it's pretty spendy- don't get it, it's cheap stuff with fancy packaging. You go to the little store in town and get a package of the gray tape, sometimes it's called g-tape or gravity tape, it's cheap and will hold just about anything. I know how to get the tacky stuff  _off_ , don't worry. (If you end up needing that, look for a solvent that has ether and kerosene in it. Brand don't matter. Make sure you use it somewhere with windows or a good powerful fan. Alcohol- the sterilizing kind- will work, and you can even use cooking oil, if it's something you're willing to soak in oil for a little while. They're all some variety of flammable so be careful with it, and all of those can strip other things off your deal too, so don't g-tape anything you don't mind dousing in alcohol. The fancy version of g tape is the same stuff, trust me.) 

I did share that port with her. Inara, I mean, I didn't think you'd mind. Y'all have seen me drunk, so you already know, but I don't really hold my liquor well. Given that, and the fact that I can be on duty at the drop of a hat, I try not to drink too much when we're in the black. I have been drunk while trying to repair a ship, it's not fun for anybody.

Inara wasn't _happy_ with the news, I'd say, but I think she just ain't happy about not knowing about who he was before he got his claws in her. She's glad that he ain't bothering anybody on Persephone anymore, it just seems kinda bittersweet for her. I try not to poke it too much, you know. She laughed when I told her about Victoirianne's fightin lessons, so there's that. 

I'm so happy to hear about all the work you're doing! I have to admit, I honestly don't remember any kind of rants but I can get fired up when I'm that drunk, so I can't say as I'm surprised. Sounds like you're doin good work though, and I'm as happy as can be about that. 

The hair stuff is amazing, holds my hair under some pretty dire conditions. Sweat, life or death, gunshot wounds. (I'm fine, though. Recovering well, don't worry!)

I'll tell ya all about it-

When we dropped the goats off, we were fixed ok for money, but needed to get some more supplies for the ship, so we decided to ontake passengers, as our next stop was a pretty popular one for certain types. (People who, you know, don't want to be noticed on registered ships. Sometimes we have to operate a little outside the law, given that the law is more or less what you make of it. The outer planets didn't get a lot of fancy Alliance police to back up being brought in, you know? None of the benefits of union we were promised, I'll tell you that much for free.) That package caught up with me just about when we offloaded our goat friends. (I met their new owners, super nice folks. I'm kind of sad some of those goats will be dinner, but that's how it goes. We ended up with some fresh meat for the first time in a long while, and it weren't any goats I knew, so that's alright.)

I wanted to do some work so we wouldn't, you know, fall out of the sky.

Firefly class ships are pretty good if you can afford to do the upkeep on 'em, but they do have some expensive parts, so we're slowly replacing things as needed. It's not going as quickly as we'd like, it never is, but that's how it works. I got a couple parts together, though, and we've got a little spendin cash for a while, so we could restock and refuel. All that important shiply stuff.

(As a side note, Inara asked me to tell y'all never to send money. She says it could get us robbed, and she's right. People keep track of that kind of thing out here, they tell their cousins, and then we've got an armed robbery on our hands. Goods are fine, almost nobody's gonna risk sticking a ship up over some salve and a touch of booze, but cash will get us in trouble. You're good and generous folks, so I'm passin that along. And really, nothin too flashy. We're not flashy folks, havin flashy stuff may make us a target, you know?) 

Some of our passengers paid in goods, and in service, some in cash. Mal says it's what he expected.

There was a very fine doctor, a Shepherd, and a couple of random people who just paid money for going 'anywhere but here'. The doctor had a pretty interesting box with him, and part of his fee was around it being transported and hidden. Alliance-trained doctors are worth their weight in gold, don't ya know. He's not just a medtech who knows how to operate machinery, he knows how to diagnose and cure. Uncommon, as far from the central planets as we ended up. 

The Shepherd had a load of fresh strawberries! Some other fruit too. We'd been eating protein paste and drinking goat's milk long enough that fresh fruit was _more_ than enough to pay his fare. He says he wants to stay on with us, even after everything that happened. I like him a lot, but Mal doesn't seem sure. I think Mal's suspicious of anybody who's got that much faith in anything at all. I think he lost a lot of his faith in everything, what with the war. 

(I can't really conceal that much, the man goes around wearing a big brown coat, don't he?)

The goat cheese, hm, I thought it turned out okay, but Wash (our pilot) wasn't a fan. Zoe was, Jayne wasn't, I was, and Mal thought he could have done better.

I think it went fine with the strawberries the good Shepherd brought us, but we probably won't be repeatin that one. Maybe if Mal get's his hands on actual cow's milk, we can get more agreement, but I'm worried we don't drink it often enough to be able to digest it so easy. 

Anyway, we took on all these passengers, and started back for the black, hoping to get rid of most of 'em on our next stop. And then things got... weird. 


End file.
